Month: May 2006

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Great Day Out, But………………….

Yesterday we had a rather nice day out at the West Midlands Safari Park and the Severn Valley Railway. The safari park was great as we got there early to avoid the crowds. You can really get close to the animals, including lions, tigers, elephants and giraffes. We even had a horned cow put it's head through the window to say hello!
 
After the safari park we went to the railway. We only went to Bewdley, but it was a nice trip. It was interesting to see that the safari park was packed when we went past on the train! We were hauled by the 8F and the Stanier Mogul. All in all a jolly day, and we completely missed getting drowned in the showers 😉
 
Trouble is that yesterday's Bank Holiday, was traditionally Newcastle's carnival day. However, the political geniuses who ran our Borough Council cancelled it as they said it cost too much. This is after they spent nearly £1000 last year on Posh 'n' Becks impersonators! 
It was replaced by a Jazz and Blues festival. OK, not too bad, but all the gigs were in local pubs and not in town or at the Brampton. They still had charity stalls in town, but forgot to tell most of the charities that they could still have a stall. Well done local politicians! 
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Knives & Planes

Why have there been so many stabbings recently? I think there have been three school kids and a chap on a train at Oxenhome stabbed in the last couple of weeks. I suppose a lot of it is down to gang culture and that these fools think they need to carry knives as they are 'hard', 'kewl' or need them as they need 'protection' or that they need 'respect'. Well none of that is true, especially the respect bit. These fools think that carrying a knife or being hard makes them deserve respect from others. WRONG!!! Being a person who does work for the community without banging on about it, being a great leader or being a great engineer or scientist, as examples, are people who deserve respect, not some jumped up little thugs. Trouble is, they are far too stupid to realise this!
 
As I was in the garden this afternoon, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight came overhead. The Hurricane, Lancaster and Spitfire made an enormous sound as they flew quite low overhead. I can't imaging what a squadron of fighters or a bomber formation would have looked and sounded like. Quite impressive and scary really. It's good to see them still flying as my Grandpa (Ken Wood) worked on Hurricanes and Lancasters during the War (he was a mechanic). The chap who designed the Spitfire , Reginald Mitchell, was also born round here!
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Oops!

Well, after complaining about how slow things go yesterday, things took a turn for the better today. The info I needed was sent to me, I sent it off, got the quotes, the boss said yes without batting an eyelid and the order's been placed. So we now get two new spangly backup servers in August! What can I say?
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Buying Stuff

I don't believe some people. I rang up someone yesterday to get a quote for some back up servers as the boss has found some money. The chap I spoke to said that I needed to speak to someone else, so he'd get him to ring me. Over 24 hours and two follow up phone calls from me later – nothing. It's not that I want a favour from them I want to buy something from them for goodness sake.  And, of course, no one else can possibly get in touch………… 😎
 
UPDATE:
 
Oh well, I take it back, just had a phone call 🙂
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Jobs

Oh dear. Silverscreen, who Carol works for, finally closed on Sunday. They had been in administration since the end of March, but decided to call it a day at the weekend. So after Friday, she has no job Cry.
 
She went for an interview yesterday, only to be told that she would have got the job had the company not screwed up and given it to an existing manager! Not impressed.
 Oh well, she has another tomorrow, just hope it goes well. 
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Old Friends

My old Scout Leader popped round tonight to catch up with me. Now this may not sound very noteworthy, but as he was headhunted by Caltech nearly 20 years ago (ouch- that long???) and now works for the University of Chicago, he doesn't pop by too often. Apparently it's something to do with the commuting :-D.
Anyway, it was good to see him again and have a good chat. It was a shame we didn't get longer as the last time I saw him was at my wedding and I was a bit busy that day! 
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Charity & Footballers

I'm very proud of my Mum as she managed to raise over £1000 for the Children's Society yesterday by holding a coffee day. She's spent ages organising it, my Dad too for that matter!

Now compare this with the footballer who signed for Chelsea yesterday. It was reported in the news that he is to be paid £135000 a week! That's over £7 million a year for kicking a football around. Now no matter how skilled at football he may (and I guess he must be), he is not worth THAT much. His wages for just over an hour would cover the amount that my Mum, a retired person, took weeks to raise. I must admit, I'd quite happily accept 1% of his salary ;-).

Perhaps these overpaid, vacant footballers should look to someone like David Gilmour, the Pink Floyd guitarist, who having decided to sell his house in London, gave all the proceeds (approx £4 million) to a housing charity as he said he didn't need the money!

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Green Photos!

After Claire and Tez's wedding, I wanted my photos back ASAP. Thinking Jessops in town would be open, we went down the day after to get them printed. They weren't open so we had to go to Morrisons. 

I had two films and a load of digital photos to be printed. Apparently, they couldn't cope with doing so many prints in one hour, so I had to wait for two.

Two hours later, we picked them up and went off to Carol's parents to show them. Trouble was the all had a really bad green colour cast Yell.

So I went back the next day. The sales assistant was not exaclty going out of her way to be helpful and took some persuading there was a green colour cast. She said that she could reprint the films but the digital pictures were right. That was until I showed her a print out from my PC on a laser printer which showed the correct colours! Two hours later, I came to pick them up. Before I had checked them, the assistant vanished round the back. When I checked all the prints, they still had a green colour cast!

I called the assistant back, told her the colour cast was still there and she took my print out and photos and stomped off to find her supervisor. When I'd explained everthing to the supervisor, she told me there was nothing wrong! After some discussion (!), where she told me there was nothing wrong with the prints, that I'd edited the pictures on the PC, as the background was grass on some of the pictures there was no colour cast etc. etc., she agreed that there was a problem! I finally got a full refund. This took over half an hour.

So I took them to Jessops and unsuprisingly they printed them correctly.

The moral? Only take films to be developed and printed to a company that knows what they are doing and not to places who try to make out that you are wrong and not them!

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Ignorant, lazy people.

Why are people so lazy and ignorant? I've just walked to the shops and there are people who have parked their cars all over the pavement. I'm getting fed up people thinking they have the 'right' to park where they want and sod everyone else.

If someone with a child in a buggy or someone in a wheelchair wanted to get past these f***wits, they couldn't, except by going on the road.  More accidents waiting to happen.

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Wedding Weekend

On Saturday, Carol's sister Claire got married to Tez. They had a great day, the weather behaved and the reception went to plan. So huge congatulations to them both!

Carol was Matron of Honour and she looked georgeous.

The only downer was that I picked up an ear infection! Oh and there was a small problem with the piccys I took, more of that later………. 

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Election Results

Well, that was interesting. Our council has gone to one with no one in overall charge (Labour were in control before) and a couple of quite high profile and long standing Labour Councillors have lost their seats.
I'm not surprised that the Conservatives won in our area. The Lib Dems haven't been very high profile recently, which to be fair was in part down to the health of the Councillor who stood down. Labour were contemptuous of the electorate as they didn't even bother to do any canvassing until two days before the election! So well done to our new local Councillor, just don't go quiet until the next elections!

One thing that is interesting is that in Stoke, next door to us in Newcastle, the Council has also gone to no overall control, but there have been a lot of people voting for the BNP. Bad move Stoke! 

It now seems that the Government is in a major mess and everyone is blaming everyone and his dog for their own problems! 

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Local Elections – Labour Wake up at Last!

Today, two days before the local elections, we finally get some info from the Labour party. First for a year – ooooo there must be an election on. 
 
Apart from the fact that it's basically meaningless, it was printed at a professional printers on glossy paper. It's no wonder they are giving away peerages for money. The other parties do their leaflets on photocopiers.
 
Can't wait to see the results on Friday Cool
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Driving

I'm getting fed up about the appalling standard of driving on our roads these days. I took my test in 1988 and again 3 years ago so I could drive the School's minibus. I passed both times first time! So I can say that my driving is at least reasonable.

In the tests there was some mention about speed limits, red lights, double yellow lines and the like. Thing is that it seems that most people choose to ignore such inconveniences. I've been overtaken on urban roads when travelling at 30 mph – the legal speed limit. You can see that these prats are annoyed to be kept to the speed limit.

Recently a local man was killed on his motorbike while he was trying to escape a policeman. Now, any loss of life in such circumstances is tragic, but he was trying to escape as he had no tax on his motorbike. If I remember correctly, he was a banned driver and had no insurance. But, and this is a big but, he was still prepared to ride his bike on the roads. This chap's family were blaming the police. He was prepared to break the law and endanger other people's lives, but it's the police's fault.

All this comes down to the idea the we live in a free country and that people can do what what they want. This is an excuse for basically being selfish. The idea is that 'I can do what I want' and sod everyone else and sod the consequences. It seems that no-one is bothered about anyone else now, just as long as they can do what they want and get their own way. What happened to social responsibility?